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A Recipe for More Homelessness

The draft version of the Section 8 Savings Act released earlier this year by the majority staff of the House Financial Services Committee includes several excellent proposals that would cut administrative costs for public housing authorities, allowing them to more efficiently manage the programs that subsidize rents for more than three million of the country’s poorest families. But one damaging provision that crept into the draft would undo all of that good.

Photo

Shanti Devi and Ram Sakhi fixing a handpump in the Mahoba district of Uttar Pradesh, India.Credit
WaterAid/Marco Betti

The provision would allow housing programs to raise rents on nearly 700,000 of the households that receive federal rent assistance, most by a minimum of $300 a year, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington. This would be a severe and unjustifiable burden for these extremely poor families, the majority of whom subsist on less than $3,000 per year. The report argues that higher rents would force some poor families to divert resources from basic needs like food, clothing and medicine. Others would be unable to cover the new costs forcing them to double up with relatives, move into shelters or into the streets.

The goal of the proposed Section 8 Savings Act is to reduce costs for cash-strapped public housing authorities so that they can do more to help the poor in these tough times. The rent proposal would make life even harder for struggling families and could drive up the costs to taxpayers, by pushing more people into shelters, which cost far more than permanent apartments. The provision should be dropped before the draft bill moves into final form.

A version of this editorial appears in print on December 6, 2011, on Page A28 of the New York edition with the headline: A Recipe for More Homelessness. Today's Paper|Subscribe